“I am sick to death of cleverness,” wrote the very clever Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is so clever nowadays.... The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was tormented by the thought that he was “merely clever” and criticized himself and others for valuing cleverness over genuine wisdom. Søren Kierkegaard, who placed a genuinely religious life before a merely aesthetic one, wrote that “the law for the religious is to act in opposition to cleverness.”
Is there really something wrong with being clever? Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes, its associations remain overwhelmingly positive: Cleverness is seen as a source of not just amusement but insight. Nonetheless, many will identify with Wilde’s complaint; the cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance. Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?
When you write with a fountain pen, you experience writing as a truly physical activity, one that affects all your senses. There’s the sort of chalky, silty smell of the ink; the scratch of the pen dragging across the page; the feel of the barrel and the cap you screw on at every pause in writing lest the ink dry faster; the glint of the wet ink that goes to matte while you examine your words. The only sense you don’t experience with a fountain pen is taste—at least I’d hope not. Having to attend to all these sensations, I think you can come close to the sort of improved mental processing neurologists ascribe to walking. And you can do it without even leaving your desk.
Folks (FOLKS), I do not want a punny Wordle. Wordle should not be cutesy, or themed, or even ironic. Wordle should stay hard and weird. No hints! Especially no thematic hints! People on Twitter should post their scores and we should be able to scoff privately. Haha what a loser it took him four guesses! When the word is “feast” you then must wonder—did he intentionally take four guesses, so as not to appear lame??
“The Twist of a Knife” is a race-against-the-clock, classic crime fiction cocktail. While paying homage to the genre’s Golden Age, Horowitz also gives a nod to Alfred Hitchcock, adopting his voyeuristic approach to storytelling and building tension as Hitchcock did in “The 39 Steps” and “Saboteur” in which innocent protagonists go on the run. Borrowing from here and there — including from himself — Horowitz has, paradoxically, created something wholly original.
A prolific correspondent and artful curator of his own life, the British novelist John le Carré left behind a trove of personal letters when he died, age 89, at the end of 2020. There were letters to family members, to politicians, to actors, to fellow novelists, to current and former spies, to star-struck strangers seeking advice, to lifelong friends and to Jane, his wife of 48 years who died, of cancer, two months after he did.
Tim Cornwell, the third of le Carré’s four sons, took on the mammoth task of organizing this unwieldy mass. The result, “A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré,” published by Viking on Dec. 6, shows the author, one of the last great practitioners of the increasingly obsolescent art of letter-writing, at his erudite, opinionated, pugilistic, witty and self-reflective best.
Like one in 10 people, Judith Thurman writes with her left hand. This “used to be considered a malign aberration,” she points out in the introduction to her new essay collection; even when she was a girl, in the McCarthyist 1950s, there were social disadvantages (of more than one kind) to being a “leftie.” Yet this now-unremarkable token of difference seems to have instilled in her a lasting affinity for people — especially women — who, in their lives and careers, have been vilified for swimming against the current.
Between the two of us, my father and I have more than 50 diaries. Mine are a wealth of embarrassments: elementary-school poems that rhyme first base with corn flakes, a photo of an ex–best friend with the edges burned in some teenage rage, gushing during college about first love and infidelity, and more recently, a list of baby names that I’m relieved were never chosen. (Was I really considering Amapola?) My father’s diaries, which date back to the 1960s, are a mash-up of half-finished watercolors, to-do lists, and reflections on addiction. As humiliating and incoherent as most of these diaries are, I cannot part with them. And so they sit there, stacked in banker’s boxes in my childhood attic, collecting dust and rat poop.
My diary collection is dwarfed by Sally MacNamara Ivey’s. She has read more than 10,000 unpublished diaries and spent 35 years collecting them. She keeps nearly 1,000 in her Washington State home. With her blue-rimmed librarian glasses and wavy golden hair, she’s part archivist and part romantic, on a mission to sort, catalog, and find a forever home for all of her diaries. They’re tucked away in plastic bins in each of her closets, stacked on nightstands, and stored securely in six-foot-tall, 1,000-pound safes in her garage. “If someone robs me,” she told me, “they’re going to be very disappointed.”
But after traversing those first 600 pages—I have read only the opening slice of Proust’s million-word novel, a small, small sample, I admit—I could not shake the impression that Proust loved not only food, but also writing food. The cookery runs deep into the language. Food is a truth of its own: young Marcel feels his mother’s love “like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin,” and later, preparing for his first trip to the theater, finds he is “as little capable of deciding which play I should prefer to see as if, at the dinner table, [someone] had obliged me to choose between rice à l’Impératrice, and the famous cream of chocolate.” (How better to convey cravings than with something sweet?) At one point, a frantically lovesick Swann approaches a window he believes to be that of his then-mistress, Odette, and peers jealously “between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden juice.” Eating and loving intermingle, with many characters seeming to conflate one with the other. Later, in a moment of jealousy that interrupts his enjoyment of a glass of Odette’s orangeade, Swann works himself up imagining that someone else would ever taste her recipe.
Enter Solarpunk. By its simplest definition, Solarpunk is a literary and art movement which imagines what the future could look like if the human species were actually to succeed in solving the major challenges associated with global warming, from reducing global emissions to overcoming capitalist economic growth as the primary motor of human society. These seemingly titanic tasks are actually pragmatic necessities dictated by scientific knowledge. We know, for example, that it is simply impossible to have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. And yet, this impossibility is exactly where we are still heading towards as a species.
We know, in other words, that we need to move towards a situation in which there is some kind of equilibrium between our species and the rest of the natural world. Some popular films already do this — think of Marvel’s Wakanda in “Black Panther” or Hayao Miyazaki’s films — but what is often missing; the gap which Solarpunk is trying to fill; is a positive futurism grounded in our present world. This is why Solarpunk emphasizes community-building and mutual aid. Its imagined futures lie at the intersection of both positive and negative scenarios, all of which are possible, incorporating everything from degrowth or postgrowth to Indigenous rights, feminism, racial justice and decolonization.
I read once that when ducks sleep in a big group, those on the outer rim keep one side of their brains awake. This is what it’s like to be a writer, at least in my case. You’re never off the clock. What if you miss overhearing a perfect word from two booths down at the diner? What if someone opens their purse in a waiting room, and random objects spill out: a pair of pantyhose, unicorn-flavored gum? If you are on a walk, and a neighbor’s garage is open, you want to see what they have on their shelves: laundry detergent, potting soil, rock salt. Like the duck on half alert, the writer doesn’t let their guard down.
It is clear early on that “A Dangerous Business,” the new mystery novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley, is a love letter to Monterey. The fickle exchanges of fog, rain, wind and sun are characters as much as the novel’s two young heroines are. The flora and fauna are properly noted and kvelled over, and the layout of the town, circa 1853, is rendered in such detail, a reader might be tempted to sketch a street map just to keep track. It is this richness of detail, both historical and in the natural world, that elevates the novel above the likes of Nancy Drew.
By eschewing pseudo-intellectualism, it gets straight to the heart of the problem — a problem as relevant now as when the book was first published, in 1946.
In the 44 years since, the OSPD has been revised six times, adding thousands of new words. A seventh edition was released earlier this month. It includes headline-grabbers like COVID, VAX, and DOX (and VAXX and DOXX), and a lowercase variant of JEDI. Also in: GUAC, INSPO, ZOODLE, and SKEEZY. “You’ve got some fun new words,” said Peter Sokolowski, editor at large of Merriam-Webster Inc., which has published the OSPD since its inception.
Hidden by the buzz over the latest lingo, though, is an underlying truth about chronicling our ever-evolving language: The American dictionary business is slowly dying. Of the publishers of the OSPD’s five original source books, Merriam-Webster is the last with a staff of full-time lexicographers producing regular, robust updates, all of it now online. The others are either defunct or ghost works updated rarely and modestly by freelance lexicographers, and have either no web presence or a stagnant one; a recent print edition of one of them boasted “dozens” of new words and senses, which is not a lot of new words and senses. (Merriam does issue new printings of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the primary Scrabble sourcebook and the basis for its free online dictionary, with some of its new words, but the last full overhaul in print was an 11th edition published in 2003.)
During the past two centuries, educators, psychologists, toy companies and parents like us have acted, implicitly or otherwise, as if the purpose of play is to optimise children for adulthood. The dominant model for how to do that has been the schoolhouse, with its reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. The more book learning we could doll up as play, and then cram into our children, the better. Then, with the rise of neuroscience in the second half of the 20th century, toys were increasingly marketed and purchased for the purpose of building better brains in order to build more competitive and successful grownups – to make Homo sapiens that were a little more sapient.
The pressure to do that has been felt most intensely with the youngest kids, aged five and under, and in recent decades the market has bestowed upon us such brands as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius and Fat Brain (tagline: “Toys that Matter to Their Gray Matter”). By 2020, the broad category of educational toys was making nearly $65bn (£55bn) worldwide, a figure that is forecast to double within the decade. Toys that teach – from the Speak & Spell and the See ’n Say to an entire phylum of learn-to-code robots – now pervade many young lives. “This generation of parents is asking toys to provide an end product, and that end product is prosperity,” Richard Gottlieb, an influential toy industry consultant, told me. “They want toys to get their children into Harvard.”
The obvious solution to this problem—at least to anyone who's read any Arthur C. Clarke novels or watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey—is to slow the metabolism of crew members so they only need to ingest a bare minimum of resources while in transit. In 2001, astronauts lie down in sarcophagus-like hibernation pods, where their hearts beat just three times a minute and their body temperature hovers at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Bradford has devoted a huge chunk of his 21-year career at SpaceWorks to investigating a question that Kubrick had the artistic license to ignore: How, exactly, can we safely power down a human body so it's just one step removed from death, then revive it on demand?
There's something fascinating about the water component — it's the bulk of the cooking process, it doesn't require you to be in the kitchen for the entirety, but it's unique to repeatedly cook down, add water, cook it out, allowing water to evaporate and concentrate the flavors over and over, until the sauce is so immensely flavored and rich that you must eat it post haste.
For all my understanding of the body, nothing about medicine or science has explained the abstract part of our being which defines the self, the very nature of being alive. Chemically, biologically, we can dissect every part of the human body and explain its mechanisms to the core. Spiritually, we all believe different things about how we come to exist in the universe. In truth, I don’t know that it matters if we are certain in our knowledge of either. At the end of the day, we live as best we can until we become obsolete.
From almost the first line, the author addresses the complexities of the task, declaring that most of us will begin this book with ‘the fatal illusion of believing we know what an emperor is’ (xiii). The major concern of In the Shadow of the Gods is the idea of the character of a ruler, allowing the reader to understand how empires functioned and why some were ultimately successful when others were not. In this manner, the book is a fine addition to scholarship on the concept of a ruler in its various forms and the systems in which they worked.
An assured book, The Song of the Cell is free of overly complex detail that would submerge the reader. The result is a confident, timely – and most importantly, biologically precise – exploration of what it means to be human.
Each day the same now:
I wake her up—she’s a woman
in the making, and me,
I’m still a boy, given this responsibility
I used to scuba dive way more than I should. I pretty much did everything: open-water dives, technical dives, spearfishing, and cave diving. It's a fun sport that allows you to see some incredible things, but there’s also tons of science that goes into the process of safely putting a human underwater. So let’s discover what scuba diving can teach us about physics.
We all know the central role that great food had always played in Greek culture throughout the previous centuries.
But Sparta, despite its great prominence in the Greek cultural landscape, appears to be an exception to this rule. How can Sparta, the city and land of legends, of heroes, of timeless and immortal myths, have declined because of its food and the customs behind sharing it?
It isn’t uncommon in my line of work as an emergency physician to attend to the so-called frequent flier. Frequent fliers, also known as “high utilizers” to the hospital administration, are patients who are well-known to everyone in the emergency department. Some will show up as often as several times a week with predictable complaints—chest pain, lower-back pain, anxiety, alcohol intoxication, depression, suicidal ideation. Some have a substance-abuse problem; some are homeless; many suffer from schizophrenia or other forms of psychotic or disorganized thinking. But there is only one thing I can think of that binds them all together. They are all lonely.
A few weeks ago, two separate artists, each a giant in his respective field, both published a new nonfiction book. Each book features free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness musings, a series of essays both personal and historical on the medium they’ve mastered and about the works that have inspired them, informed their worldviews, and continued to influence them. Each book tells us something about these celebrated artists: their foundational texts, their preferences and peccadillos, and how their contributions have moved their respective art forms forward. But read together, and in conversation with each other, they tell us even more.
At the outset of the Covid-19 lockdown, Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, invited various architects, urban planners, writers and other experts to suggest walking tours of New York City, hoping that the itineraries would offer “examples of how the city remains beautiful, inspiring, uplifting.” Within days, the first account of what would ultimately be 17 walks was published, a conversation between a critic and a thinker, set within a particular area of the city. Now those walks, plus three more, have been assembled into a collection, “The Intimate City,” each chapter a geographic memoir: streetscape-jogged annotations on history, infrastructure, planning and combinations thereof, complemented by photos, many from the original series. “I was on the lookout,” Kimmelman says in his introduction, “for stories, both intimate and about the city, that I thought seasoned, savvy New Yorkers might find surprising — tidbits of history, law, technology or gossip I hadn’t heard myself, or that revealed something about the people who were telling the stories.”
I don’t know if Ling Ma is an insomniac, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she is. For the sleepless, the veil between consciousness and the realm of dreams is worn thin; waking life is rendered fuzzy, but if you squint, it might glow. Ma’s new story collection, Bliss Montage, slips into the space that emerges when our grasp of practical reality eases and our sense for psychedelic possibilities expands. Rife with symbols of dreams and the unconscious, Bliss Montage explores abuse, immigration, and passive societal decline through prose as cool and fine as hotel linens. By draping her stories in the language and atmosphere of the surreal, Ma challenges us to try our hand at the lost art of interpretation—the humble recognition that our perception of any moment, traumatic or mundane, is at best a good guess.
In Factory Girls, however, Michelle Gallen breathes new life into Troubles literature, presenting a fresh, modern view of 1994 revolutionary Ireland. Gallen, who grew up in near the border of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, grapples with local violence but also sexism, abortion, desire, body image, mental health, and generational trauma, following three young women who take summer jobs in a shirt factory before they head off to university. In doing so, she weaves a story of small-town Northern Ireland that stretches far beyond its borders.
Drawing on her own experience of working in the aged care sector, Herbert writes with palpable warmth and empathy for her characters as she alternates between perspectives including those of long-suffering village manager Fiona and Harewood Hall occupants such as pernickety but good-hearted retired engineer Martin.
Books devoted to a solitary item, dubbed microhistories, are a relatively recent genre yet already an industry, generating volumes on everything from salt to pencils, rats to bananas and, yes, soup to nuts. It was only a matter of time before somebody hit bottoms, an investigation into that body part over which so many people obsess yet never glimpse without assistance from mirror, smartphone or partner.
Heather Radke’s winning, cheeky and illuminating “Butts: A Backstory” arrives with a voluptuous peach garnishing the cover. Filtered through a feminist lens, “Butts” is a hybrid memoir and investigation exclusively into women’s rears — and folks with an aptitude for drag. Though curious and wide-ranging in her investigation, Radke chose to leave some behinds behind. Her interest lies in glutei maximi that tend toward maximal. This book has back, as Sir Mix-a-Lot might say. (The song, which Radke describes as “deploying a warm, goofy jollity,” naturally earns its own chapter.)
Two young women hold the keen gaze of the photographer with equal intensity; a woman clasps a man’s hand and he greets her with a coy, perhaps shy, tilt of his head. There’s a timelessness to the black-and-white photos in “Last Day in Lagos,” unpublished until now. The first few images emerge like frames from a film long forgotten, rendering legible the everyday experiences of Black people — specifically, the 17,000 Black artists and musicians who in 1977 made their way to Lagos, Nigeria, for FESTAC ’77, a monthlong Pan-African celebration of Blackness in its many forms.
The story of human history is often told as one of a desperate struggle for survival, dominated by war and conquest, plagues and empires. But it could perhaps be narrated just as well through the quieter language of color.
Our species has been finding ways to color the world around us for as long as we’ve existed. Our nearest ancient relatives, Neanderthals, painted cave walls in Spain at least 60,000 years ago using red ochre, a naturally occurring mineral dug from the earth. Even older artifacts suggest that Neanderthals may have been using red ochre as a pigment as far back as 250,000 years ago. Since then, color-making has followed humans everywhere, from the brilliant blues of ancient Egypt to the beguiling purples of China’s Han dynasty.
Blue whales are not only the world’s largest animals, over 75 feet long and weighing around 300,000 pounds; they are the world’s loudest, whose 180-decibel songs—as loud as a jet plane—can be heard 500 miles away by properly-attuned ears. (If it seems strange that their songs are so loud yet imperceptible to us, consider that our ears barely register 100-decibel dog whistles.) But now their voices have inexplicably shifted from bass to basso profundo, Elvis to Barry White. And that shift is consistent around the world—even though the local anthems are not.
In his 1995 essay Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida describes the archive as “a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.” “In an archive,” he continues, “there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret […] [T]his can only have grave consequences for a theory of the archive, as well as for its institutional implementation.” Chilean author Nona Fernández’s 2013 novel Space Invaders, released in Natasha Wimmer’s English translation by Graywolf Press in the United States in 2019 and published in the United Kingdom this July by Daunt Books, operates on the cusp of archival collapse. It is about the spectral voices that haunt official history — a taking into account of the forgetfulness and erasure that are both a condition of the archive and a potential source of its undoing.
Marigold and Rose can be devoured in a single sitting, and that’s probably the best way to enter its tonal world, which is strangely hypnotic, in part because the mood never swings to violent intensity, and in part because of the orderly rhythms of Glück’s prose. Ten short chapters tell us – though not in exact chronological order – about the first year in the life of twin girls, the eponymous Marigold and Rose. During this period their grandmother dies, their mother experiments with going back to work, and they are “distracted, like all babies, by feelings of triumph. First crawling, then walking and climbing, then talking.”
The real Tokyo, as any denizen of the world’s most populous metropolis knows, is found in the smallest of spaces. Japan’s capital is not a city of grand arterial boulevards. Its lifeblood flows instead through tangles of narrow alleys, up the stairs of slim buildings and into tiny shops and cramped eateries.
Take Nonbei Yokocho, or Drunkard’s Alley, a charmingly defiant cluster of watering holes in the shadow of Shibuya railway station. The average size of the 38 establishments is just under five square metres, notes “Emergent Tokyo”, a new book by Jorge Almazán, an architect, and his colleagues at Keio University. They nominate Tokyo as a model of a liveable megacity and explore its workings—and in so doing show how perceptions of it have evolved.
Now when I close the chicken coop at night, I stand in the altar and give a eulogy. I say how grateful I am to have spent a third of a century under its gaze. I thank the tree for its contribution to this farm, for standing by my family in good times and bad. I whisper a prayer for whatever is the afterlife of trees, and hum a favorite hymn, “Ein Feste Burg,” singing a sad goodbye to what was, indeed, a mighty fortress.
Much of the lore about the chamber’s propensity for mind-annihilation centers on the concept of blood sounds. It is an oft-reported experience, in anechoic chambers, for visitors to become aware of the sound of blood pumping in their heads, or sloshing through veins. Hearing the movement of blood through the body is supposedly something like an absolute taboo, akin to witnessing the fabrication of Chicken McNuggets — an ordeal after which placid existence is irreparably shattered.
Owing either to blood-sound insanity or cost, the record duration in the Orfield chamber was, until very recently, just two hours. I wanted to set a new world record for something, even if it was a world record that, for legal reasons, I could not describe as being in any way affiliated with or sanctioned by the famous Guinness inventory of world records — on which, more later. Even more than that, I wanted to hear the forbidden blood song. I emailed Orfield Labs to book a three-hour attempt and, a few days later, boarded a plane to Minnesota.
The visit was proposed during a period in which I was suffering from the tyranny of time. Which isn’t to say I was suffering because I was getting older—I didn’t care about that. I was consistently underestimating how long it took to do a thing, to do anything, consistently believing that I could accomplish, say, five things in a given span of time when really, I could do just a single thing, maybe two. This disconnect began to emerge in my understanding as a failure, and through repetition—that is, over time—the failure became a pattern of failure, until the pattern, a thick, intricate brocade, became indistinguishable from me, from my life.
There were books, I knew, to combat this. Books and podcasts, TED talks and seminars, all of which sought to solve the time problem. I didn’t want to solve it. I didn’t want to “manage my expectations” or “be realistic.” I simply wanted to believe that I could accomplish a certain number of goals in an arbitrarily delineated period of time, and then, one day, accomplish them. And the next day, do it again, until a new pattern could be created, one of success and satisfaction, that would with no effort eradicate the previous pattern, unspool it until it was just a pile of thread that could blow away on a stiff breeze.
Culture shock is, in fact, central to Tawada’s subject matter: her characters tend to be travelers of one kind or another—mail-order brides, bewildered exchange students—forced to wander in the gap between languages, where the meaning of ordinary daily experience turns slippery and weird. Consider “The Guest,” translated into English from the German by Susan Bernofsky, in which her narrator finds herself in a German flea market, struggling to make sense of the many odd objects arrayed in no apparent order, until, finally, she picks up what looks to be a book.
or nearly a decade, Bell had beamed Coast into the dead of night, five nights a week, from 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. PST. Boasting 15 million nightly listeners across the United States at the height of his popularity, he famously dealt in paranormal, conspiratorial, and supernatural themes. “From the high desert and the great American Southwest,” Bell intoned over the pulse of Giorgio Moroder’s paranoid Midnight Express instrumental, “I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be.”
The mythologies of both night and desert lent Coast the allure of the unknown, locating it on the fringes of experience. One could equally expect to tune in to discussions of life on Mars, Bigfoot sightings, vaccine-administered microchips, government-sanctioned alien-hybrid breeding programs, doomsday predictions, or cataclysmic climate change.
Mr. Knight, 75, is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, which is less a movement than a loose consortium of people who believe that the best thing humans can do to help the Earth is to stop having children.
Mr. Knight added the word “voluntary” decades ago to make it clear that adherents do not support mass murder or forced birth control, nor do they encourage suicide. Their ethos is echoed in their motto, “May we live long and die out,” and in another one of their slogans, which Mr. Knight hangs at various conventions and street fairs: “Thank you for not breeding.”
On 25 February 1988, at a performance in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bruce Springsteen forgot the opening lines to his all-time greatest hit, Born to Run.
According to the conventional wisdom about the nature of forgetting, set down in the decades straddling the turn of 20th Century, this simply should not have happened. Forgetting seems like the inevitable consequence of entropy: where memory formation represents a sort of order in our brains that inevitably turns to disorder. Given enough time, cliffs crumble into the sea, new cars fall to pieces, blue jeans fade. As Springsteen put it in his song Atlantic City: "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact." Why should the information in our minds be any different?
The life and death of a female monkey sacrificed some 1,700 years ago may provide important clues to the rise of one of the world’s most powerful ancient cities: Teotihuacan. Located in what is now Mexico, this power center influenced much of Mesoamerica in the first half of the first millennium A.D.
There are sad foods from personal memories: the frozen dinner my newly divorced dad heated up in the dirty microwave in the sloppy transitional apartment that he shared with a roommate. The chocolate my mom bought me as a treat to comfort myself when she was away on business. When a date got up and left in the middle of our dinner, throwing down insufficient cash with an insufficient “I’m not feeling this—take care,” my plate of pasta was extremely sad; it became only sadder when the waitress asked me if I wanted it packaged up to go. I did.
You see, Sad Food is not the same as Solitude Food. Solitude Food celebrates the luxury of being intentionally alone. It’s often found on room-service menus when you’re spread out on the oversize bed of a chain hotel and contemplating whether to send for the burger or the salmon on your company’s credit card as you flip through cable channels and settle on an ’80s movie. A coffee shop offers a wealth of Solitude Food: a croissant balancing at the edge of a table, making room for a book and a large coffee saucer, especially if that pastry has been ordered as “the usual.” And few Solitude Foods are better than a bucket of popcorn to oneself in the back of a movie theater on a rainy weekday afternoon of playing hooky.
What made the grammar of our early years,
moving from place to place, house to flimsy
I met Rebecca Godfrey in New York City in the spring of 1999. In my memory our meeting has something to do with her first book, a novel titled The Torn Skirt; perhaps she wanted to hand me a galley, or perhaps she’d already sent me one and I’d read it; I’m not sure. What I remember for certain was how surprised and intrigued I was by her, almost on sight. She had a wonderful face of unusual dimensions, a beautiful face, but with something better than beauty, visible especially in large eyes that were somehow ardent and reserved simultaneously. It was raining and I remember her looking up at me (she was quite small) from under her umbrella in a shy, expectant way that made me feel shy and expectant too.
The quiet restaurant we had planned on was closed and so we walked around for some blocks looking for just the right place—which turned out to be a bubble tea shop where we were the only customers. We talked about writing and music; she spoke (matter-of-factly, as I recall) of working on a second book. But more than anything we said, I remember her presence, the pleasure with which she dipped her long spoon into the fluted glass for more sweet tapioca bubbles, the directness of her gaze, the way she listened intently and spoke softly. She was thirty-two years old but she had an aura of impossible youth. Her presence was not exactly big. It was enchanting; I’m thinking of the words Nabokov used to describe a character in the story “Spring in Fialta”: “something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable.
The result is a gripping, first-draft-of-history account of a virus’s first two years on Earth, pieced together from various lines of scientific evidence and then enlivened by metaphor. Quammen seems to know exactly how far into the weeds he can go—pretty far—before offering a change of pace. A few images hit me especially hard, none more so than an excursion into the conservation woes of pangolins, another possible intermediary mammal for coronavirus spillover. Quammen quotes a paper that described an illness in pangolins as rendering the animals “mostly inactive and sobbing,” before dying in custody “despite exhausting rescue efforts.” His response: “Sobbing might be taken as a metaphor for respiratory struggle, but then again, sometimes a sob is just a sob.”
Breathless, like the virus it depicts, is a dramatic culmination of an idea that Quammen introduced many of us to in Spillover: that the science story of viral ecology could very easily become the biggest story on planet Earth. Once that happened, though, it wasn’t just a science story, a complexity that Quammen acknowledges while still mostly sticking to technical matters. Politics and public health and a zillion other dimensions came into play, as did a new, forced intimacy that almost all of us bring to the subject matter. A subtle refrain echoes throughout the book, typically after a flourish of scientific detective work. “Meanwhile,” Quammen will write, “people were dying.”
In New York in the 1840s, books and printed matter were everywhere. Up and down Broadway, boxes of used books cluttered the sidewalks. Newsstands stocked papers, literary journals, and magazines, while street vendors hawked the latest serialized novels by Dickens: “He-e-ere’s the New World—Dick’s new work. Here’s the New World—buy Master Humphrey, sir?”
From storefront windows, new books appealed to pedestrians with siren songs of entertainment and instruction at bargain prices, while literary annuals, gift books, and illustrated editions catered to an expanding American readership. New steam-powered rotary printing technology invented in New York in the mid-1840s revolutionized the print industry, rolling out thousands of pages per hour, while other innovations, such as stereotype printing, enabled a boom in cheap reading matter. By 1851 publisher George Palmer Putnam had begun stocking bookstalls at railway depots with paperback “Railway Classics,” light and entertaining reading for busy persons in transit. Mass-produced paper, machine-made from wood pulp rather than handmade from cotton, also stimulated growing networks of transcontinental and transatlantic correspondence. “This vile thin paper is my abhorrence,” complained publisher Evert Duyckinck to his brother George. “It is characteristic of the age. Would Milton have written on it? The aqua fortis of his Eikonoclastes would have gone through a quire of it. Charles Lamb never could have used it.”
What Bates and many later evolutionary biologists couldn’t explain was how this mimicry was possible. Getting the right shades of aquamarine and fiery orange in the right places on the wings required a constellation of precisely tuned genes. Those traits would have to be inherited with perfect fidelity, generation after generation, to preserve the Heliconius disguise. Maybe real Heliconius butterflies could afford to deviate a bit in coloration because their toxins could still teach predators to stay away in the future, but the mimics needed to be consistently flawless replicas. Yet the random reshuffling and remixing of traits in sexual reproduction should have quickly disrupted the essential coloring patterns.
Today we know that in many species the answer is supergenes—stretches of DNA that lock several genes together into a single inheritable unit. “They’re kind of a wild card,” says Marte Sodeland, a molecular ecologist at the University of Agder in Norway. This aggregated form of inheritance “has obvious advantages, because it allows rapid adaptation, but there’s a lot we don’t know yet.”
The point is, novelty or not, notebooks are very personal. It’s like buying someone face wash. Unless you’re close enough to them that you know their brand, you’re probably just wasting your money. Even Joan Didion, famous for keeping notebooks, did not use the novelty notebook she was almost certainly gifted.
Michael Connelly’s new novel about former Los Angeles police Detective Bosch finds the crime fiction icon grappling not just with the usual murder and mayhem but with his own mortality, in ways we’ve not seen before. It’s a richly emotional entry in this superb series.
One hundred years ago, on Nov. 18, 1922, Marcel Proust breathed his last in Paris at age 51. His death, from pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess, was perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the belle epoque, an age of gentility, civility and artistic achievement that had mostly ended with the outbreak of World War I. At the time, several volumes of Proust’s gargantuan, seven-part novel, “À la recherche du temps perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time”), had yet to be published. Jean Cocteau, arriving to pay tribute to the late author, spotted the manuscript resting on the mantelpiece — a pile of papers “still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.”
Proust’s death was an ending but not the end. It would be five more years before “In Search” was published in full and decades before an authoritative text was established from the morass of his marginalia. His work has since been widely acclaimed, and a Proust-industrial complex of criticism and biography has developed around him. “No one is less dead than he is,” a friend remarked, some years after his demise.
Every domesticated plant has a corresponding wild plant from which it arose, but there did not seem to be any wild counterpart of corn. Corn cannot grow in the wild without the intervention of man. Plant a corn cob and you will soon see that so many seedlings arise that they crowd each other out as they compete for nutrients, and none will survive. Corn kernels must be physically separated and planted individually to produce a healthy corn plant that can propagate its next generation. At the time Beadle started his work on corn there were several theories about the forebears of modern corn. One is that wild corn is extinct; the other is that corn was derived from a wild grass called “teosinte.”
Everything in the universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has been remarkably successful in describing the gravity of stars and planets, but it doesn't seem to apply perfectly on all scales.
I remember my first taste of butter chicken. I must have been about 10 years old. My dad’s cousins used to marinate a whole chicken from their farm in yoghurt, spices, ginger, garlic and chilli, before cooking it over an open fire: not everyone owned a tandoor.
Everything they used was from their own land: deliciously sweet and tangy tomatoes, homemade yoghurt, white makhan (a cultured butter). It was such an experience – and such a beautiful dish – that throughout the long train journey home after visiting them, I would hassle my mum to make it for us back home. Those delicate spices, though, and the smoky flavour from cooking over an open fire, are impossible for me to replicate, even now.
I chose not to set any of the present action of this novel in prison because prison is, in fiction as in life, static, repetitive. But I do describe some of the thoughts that allowed Earl to survive in prison, mostly imaginative flights that often involve an afternoon spent at a pool in Austin (an unnamed Barton Springs, where I swim almost daily). If desire is plot—and I think it mostly is—this novel is in part about a man who, in his few remaining years on earth, wants to learn to swim.
This is a very twisty tale, you may figure it out before you finish, or you may not. Either way, it’s a dark and stormy tale that is hard to leave until it is over.
From assault-victim turned outlaw in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise to the president in Commander in Chief, Davis has spent her career seeking out ballsy roles, while battling a chronic tendency towards people-pleasing off screen. “Though my characters were bold before I was, that boldness rubbed off on me,” she writes and the book is a more or less chronological account of her career and what she calls “my journey to badassery”, complete with some of her own sketches and a section of family photographs.
For almost thirty years, Kamin was the architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, and this book collects fifty-five of his columns written over the past decade. Kamin’s chief concern, through the lens of architecture, is that of equity and he sets up a guiding metaphor using the Millennium Park sculpture widely known as ‘the Bean.’ He notes how the sculpture’s metallic surface provides a striking reflection of the city’s growing and lavish downtown skyline, “But [it] does not reflect the reality of a very different Chicago.” For Kamin, ‘the Bean’ is a shiny object meant to distract from “weed-strewn vacant lots, empty storefronts, and unceasing gun violence” in a city like Chicago. Yet, how architecture can address equity isn’t limited to larger cities, playing an important role in more pastoral cities like Fort Worth, Indianapolis, or Columbus, Ohio. The essays in Who Is the City For? present Chicago as an analogue for any city and how architecture and urban design have an ability to bolster and transform the lives of individuals and their communities.
Wildlife in the Balance by Simon Mustoe is for anyone concerned about the future of our planet. Packed with scientific detail, delightful black and white drawings of anything from dugongs and tapirs to gannets, and dozens of stories that explain the science, this is a text that flips the script on how to save the planet.
About my brain, its wires glitching
like a jellyfish sprite
Around forty-three hundred years ago, in a region that we now call Iraq, a sculptor chiselled into a white limestone disk the image of a woman presiding over a temple ritual. She wears a long ceremonial robe and a headdress. There are two male attendants behind her, and one in front, pouring a libation on an altar. On the back of the disk, an inscription identifies her as Enheduanna, a high priestess and the daughter of King Sargon.
Some scholars believe that the priestess was also the world’s first recorded author. A clay tablet preserves the words of a long narrative poem: “I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling, / I was high priestess, I, Enheduanna.” In Sumer, the ancient civilization of southern Mesopotamia where writing originated, texts were anonymous. If Enheduanna wrote those words, then she marks the beginning of authorship, the beginning of rhetoric, even the beginning of autobiography. To put her precedence in perspective, she lived fifteen hundred years before Homer, seventeen hundred years before Sappho, and two thousand years before Aristotle, who is traditionally credited as the father of the rhetorical tradition.
One day last July, one of his teachers mentioned the online encyclopedia's entry about Alan MacMasters, who it said was a Scottish scientist from the late 1800s and had invented "the first electric bread toaster".
At the top of the page was a picture of a man with a pronounced quiff and long sideburns, gazing contemplatively into the distance - apparently a relic of the 19th Century, the photograph appeared to have been torn at the bottom.
But Adam was suspicious. "It didn't look like a normal photo," he tells me. "It looked like it was edited."
I like short books. I like the singular focus they offer, the same cerebral energy in a smaller package. If a writer were to write the same plot in 100, 500, and 1,000 pages, the 100-page work would likely be my favorite iteration. Further, I like books that make me think, and books that feel like a mug of warm tea. “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers fulfills my craving for a warm, thoughtful bit of reading.
Still, in the same way that you have to read a lot of books in order to write novels, to write about people you need to know a lot of them. By “know,” I don’t mean you have to really understand them deep down. All you need to do is glance at people’s appearance, notice how they talk and act, what their special characteristics are. People you like; ones you’re not so fond of; ones who, frankly, you dislike—it’s important to observe people, as much as possible, without choosing whom to watch. What I mean is, if the only people you put in your novels are the kind you like, are interested in, or can easily understand, then your novels will ultimately lack a certain expansiveness. You want all sorts of different people, doing all sorts of different actions, and it’s through that clash of differences that things get moving, propelling the story forward. So you shouldn’t just avert your eyes when you decide you can’t stomach somebody; instead, ask yourself, “What is it I don’t like about them?” and “Why don’t I like that?”
The list of good novels about movie directors is not a long one. You won’t find much beyond the over-the-top satiric Blue Movie by Terry Southern, and Diane Spiotta’s Innocents and Others, which is more about relationships than it is about movie-making.
But now the British writer Jonathan Coe has written Mr. Wilder and Me, a sometimes-funny, sometimes-melancholy, but always moving novel about the great American director Billy Wilder on the down-slope of his career.
Ted Chiang is an award-winning short story writer whose understanding of the sci-fi genre allows him to break these rules and write stories that, though overwhelmed with novelty, allow for even more experiment than a single novum could initiate. In many of his stories, Chiang combines multiple ideas and concepts that could form stories on their own, thus creating unique and enriching science fiction worlds that capture the imagination. This is demonstrated clearly in Stories of Your Life and Others (2002; republished as Arrival in 2016).
Full of dueling egos and narratives, The Stars Undying alternates between two perspectives: Princess and Oracle Altagracia Caviro Patramata, our cunning Cleopatra, and Commander Matheus Ceirran, a charismatic Caesar. Robin leverages these two legendary egos to great effect, charting their relationship and Ceirran’s rise to power. The result is an ambitious blend of romance, tragedy, and political intrigue, and one that probes compellingly at the unsteady boundaries between divinity and duplicity.
Where does a text exist? A book seems like the obvious answer, but texts can be orally transmitted, etched onto banana leaves, or downloaded from cyberspace and read on a screen. Yet whereas a text is metaphysical, books are decidedly physical (leaving aside, for now, e-books and audiobooks) and Oxford professor Emma Smith explores books as material objects in "Portable Magic," a book for people who love books.
"What matters to me is that Prince and Dickens tell me, every day, Not good enough. Not quick enough. Not enough. More, more, more. Think quicker, be more ambitious, be more imaginative. And whatever you do for a living, that's something you need to hear." He has pictures of them both on his office wall.
In the arts, especially, education consists of seeing how deeply the past informs the present. Knowing what earlier generations accomplished conveys perspective, the capacity to recognize the new from the retrograde, the original from the pastiche. In literature, the popularity of “annotated editions” of various classics shows how much we still value basic contextual information about earlier historical periods — and, paradoxically, how much we have forgotten of what was once traditional cultural literacy.
The great books are great because they speak to us, generation after generation. They are things of beauty, joys forever — most of the time. Of course, some old books will make you angry at the prejudices they take for granted and occasionally endorse. No matter. Read them anyway. Recognizing bigotry and racism doesn’t mean you condone them. What matters is acquiring knowledge, broadening mental horizons, viewing the world through eyes other than your own.
For the past few years, Brendan Fraser has been attending fan conventions. Maybe a star with a different level of vanity or self-regard wouldn’t talk about this fact because it could be seen as embarrassing, or humbling, but Fraser is not that star. He shows up, shakes hands, signs autographs, talks about the past. Shares table space with guys like Sean Astin, from The Lord of the Rings and The Goonies. Fraser started doing this, he told me, “to get over myself. Because I thought either, It’s not something I would do, or, I didn’t want to put myself in a place where I was vulnerable in front of everyone.” But then he went to a Comic Con in London. This was in 2019. Part of it, he admits, is that he was getting paid; part of it was that after a rough decade, he suddenly felt the desire to get back out there. “I wanted to see the people,” Fraser said.
Pity the tiny band of lynx in the Polish half of Europe’s most ancient forest. In June, their home, the Białowieża Forest, was cut in half when the Polish government completed construction of a wall on its border with Belarus. The aim was to repel refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere being channeled to the border by the Belarus government. But the 115-mile wall — which towers 18 feet above the forest floor, stretching almost into the canopy above — has imprisoned migrating wildlife too.
It was 2015 and I was tasting wine at a store that no longer exists, staring in puzzlement at a glass of something cloudy and orangish from Chile. It was my first time tasting natural wine’s bacterial infection du jour, a mysterious, microbial kraken lurking within countless carbonic reds in clear glass bottles with hand-drawn labels.
“Shrines of Gaiety,” the breathtaking new book by Scottish writer Kate Atkinson, is a sprawling kaleidoscope of a novel — both giddy and glamorous, despite being rooted in squalor and violence. It’s an impressive feat, one which Atkinson achieves with seeming effortlessness.
Simply put, Muñoz’s stories are as observant as they are revealing — full of nuanced subtext and bracingly honest depictions of vulnerability and hope, love and regret, and everything in between. They deserve all the attention they can get.
In September 1917, having just discovered he had tuberculosis, Franz Kafka took a break from his work at an insurance company in Prague and spent eight months with his sister Ottla in the village of Zürau, now called Siřem. He also seemed to be taking a break from writing, or at least from the writing he was supposed to be doing. In fact, he was leading what Reiner Stach calls ‘a double, and even a triple life’, hanging out with the villagers, writing letters to his friends and recording reflections in large notebooks. One of Kafka’s diary entries, written three days after he arrived in Zürau, treated his illness and his engagement to Felice Bauer, which he was about finally to break off, as parts of one symbol. ‘Take hold of this symbol,’ he told himself. Taking hold meant, among other things, writing about writing, what it could and couldn’t do, what it ought to be addressing: a sort of journey into a country of the mind. In Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (2008), Stanley Corngold talks about a ‘ministry of writing’ in this context, and the double meaning (bureaucratic and pastoral) takes us a long way into Kafka’s worlds.
There is a growing trend in American culture of what the literary theorist Peter Brooks calls “storification.” Since the turn of the millennium, he argues in his new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, we’ve relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a “narrative takeover of reality” that affects nearly every form of communication—including the way doctors interact with patients, how financial reports are written, and the branding that corporations use to present themselves to consumers. Meanwhile, other modes of expression, interpretation, and comprehension, such as analysis and argument, have fallen to the wayside.
It doesn’t ever close.
You’d need a firehose
To clean the locals out,
And even then they’d just go on burning,
It’s not difficult to create a tiny tree: you just need to restrict the roots and prune the branches. This has been known since at least the Tang dynasty in China, circa 700 A.D. One method was to plant a seedling in a dried orange peel and trim any roots that poked through. With a smaller root base, the tree cannot find the necessary nutrients to shoot upward, and thus remains small. In certain environments, like rocky cliffsides, this can occur naturally. The artistry, then, lies in shaping the tree. For most bonsai practitioners, “styling” a tree is a question of which branches to cut off and how to bend those which remain, using metal wire, so that the plant’s over-all form elicits a feeling of something ancient and wild. The usual aim is not to imitate the profile of big trees—which are considered too messy to be beautiful—but to intensely evoke them. In culinary terms, bonsai is bouillon.
Truth is a topic philosophers have spent centuries considering. We have asked questions such as: what is the content of the concept of truth? That is, what is it to think of something as true? And what is truth itself? Can we come up with a true and illuminating account of what truth really is? For example, is truth the same thing as matching the facts? How does truth relate to other important philosophical topics, such as knowledge, reasoning and assertion? Those are all good questions, but the question I’d like to focus on is one that has been discussed far less often. As it’s far more fundamental, it deserves close examination. The question is this: do we have good reason in the first place to think that some things are true?
To be fair, Spam did send a warning: The email about the brand’s new, limited-edition holiday flavor read, “Let’s just say, it’ll have you asking ‘WTF?’”
That is, indeed, what I said when I opened a mailer from the company to find figgy pudding-flavored Spam, bearing the tagline “flavor, spice, and everything nice.” Figgy pudding, of course, is that dessert of holiday carol fame, which is similar in flavor profile to fruitcake but is steamed instead of baked.
Early in The Ghost Variations, the third novel by Damian Lanigan, the narrator approaches a woman in a bar to ask her a question: “Would you mind if I played the piano a little? I’ll be quiet. And I’ll be good. I’ll be quietly good.”
Quietly good: the phrase aptly describes this accomplished book about love, grief and the constraining and consoling effects of art.
Quan Barry’s comedic 2020 novel We Ride Upon Sticks presents the story of a Massachusetts high school field hockey team that has ostensibly turned to the dark arts to turn their season around. After the starting eleven sign their names and pledge their mischief to the darkness in an Emilio Estevez-emblazoned notebook—known thereafter simply as Emilio—the Danvers Falcons run roughshod over their opposition, all the way to the state final. While carrying the reader joyously through the irreverent narrative, Barry’s first-person plural narration creates the semblance of a unified whole that is also prescient in its selective individuation: while doing the necessary work of dipping into single characters’ arcs to develop the team members as individual people, that separation and isolation prepares the reader to meet and accept the novel’s ending.
On its face, “Lessons in Chemistry” might look like an overnight success story: A career copywriter experiences some “garden variety misogyny” one day at work, takes her anger out on the page and catches the eye of an agent, who buys the manuscript on the strength of three chapters. The book goes to auction; bidding wars ensue; the novel comes out and surpasses expectations.
“I sent it out on a Tuesday,” Garmus’s agent in Britain, Felicity Blunt, said of the manuscript, “and by Wednesday morning I was getting emails that were coming in faster, faster, faster.” Blunt had to forbid Garmus from stress-exercising on her rowing machine — a habit the author shares with her main character — so that she could be reached.
In fact, it all took a great deal of work. “Part of the reality behind the myth of an overnight success,” said Garmus’s American agent, Jennifer Joel, “is that most people have actually been toiling, laboriously and diligently, in an unseen way, for years.”
Wilson’s new novel is called “Now Is Not the Time to Panic,” yet another disingenuous phrase uttered only when things have gone to hell. This time around, Wilson explores the tension between adolescent creativity and cultural paranoia, that urge to affect the world and the cost of doing so. Among other things, the story is an eerie reminder that the internet didn’t invent viral memes or the mental web on which iconic images propagate.
It’s a moment at once personal and existential, but right now it also feels strikingly pointed. In our loneliness, especially during the pandemic, we reached out to become less unknowable via social media, only to watch helplessly as one platform, a source of Black culture, joy and livelihood in particular, falls at the hands of a white male billionaire. We are seeing how tenuous such connections can be — and conversely how much humanity consists of and relies on their cumulative impact.
This recognition is Obama’s bass note, the ballast in her book of lessons. After all she has witnessed and experienced, both as a first lady and as a Black woman in America, she knows in her bones just how timely these themes of unity, compassion, gratitude, courage and the desire to see one another are: “Any time we grip hands with another soul and recognize some piece of their story they’re trying to tell, we are acknowledging and affirming two truths: We’re lonely and yet we’re not alone.”
Although reaffirming, the advice isn’t groundbreaking. What makes the book special is that it builds on parts of “Becoming,” and Obama serves as mentor and guide, using pivotal moments in her life to demonstrate when she had to rely on boldness, pluck and grit as she made her way from a second-floor apartment on Chicago’s South Euclid Avenue to the Ivy League to what she describes as a “132-room palace, surrounded by guards.”
Among the many virtues of John Lancaster’s delightful “The Great Air Race” is how vividly it conveys the entirely different world of aviation at the dawn of the industry, a century ago. Many airplanes in those days were literal death traps. A biplane known as the DH-4, used as a bomber by Allied forces in World War I, had its gas tank immediately behind the pilot in the cockpit. As Lancaster explains, “Even in relatively low-speed crashes, the tank sometimes wrenched free of its wooden cage, crushing the pilot against the engine.” To get a DH-4 properly balanced for landing, a co-pilot or passenger might have to leap out of the open cockpit and climb back to hang onto the tail. And this was one of the era’s most popular and successful models.
“What we’re talking about anthropologically is contagion magic,” Arthur Fournier, a broker of archival material and rare books, tells me, lifting his copy of The Golden Bough, James George Frazer’s canonical text from 1890, into the Zoom frame as a means of citation. The concept of sympathetic or contagion magic is that an object might bear traces of those who come into contact with it; in this case, the belief that Didion’s paperweights and trash bins might hold some mark, some residual energy, of the writer. Fournier is quick to condemn Frazer’s framing of this magic as primitive and points to “a long chain of unbroken belief in civilizations all over the world” that objects might hold some “intimate proximity, which is soulful and spiritual.”
I have made reckless pronouncements of love. These declarations are usually inappropriate, always unexpected, and often result in consequences I neither anticipate nor desire.
I first realized this after I graduated from law school and started seeing a gastroenterologist at the University of Chicago hospital. As a law student, I’d seen the specialist in Student Health, a gently alcoholic woman who was quite capable before 5:00 p.m. but less reliable after hours. In contrast, Dr. Glassman was an expert in the field. He was a short, bouncy Wallace Shawn of a man with hair like a tonsured monk and a heh-heh-heh giggle.
Carlisle Martin, the 43-year-old choreographer protagonist at the center of Meg Howrey’s fourth novel, struggles to make dances that will disrupt classical ballet’s often formulaic roles and plotlines. “There are no mothers-in-law in ballet,” she paraphrases the renowned choreographer George Balanchine. In other words, this is “not an art form suited for portraying complicated family relationships, or psychological subtleties.”
But literature is. With “They’re Going to Love You,” Howrey, a former dancer with the Joffrey Ballet who previously revisited the ballet world in her 2012 novel “The Cranes Dance,” proves herself a talented choreographer in her own right. She deftly arranges her characters’ betrayals, fidelities and accumulated disappointments to portray a family stymied by its own silences, one in which “nobody knew how to stop themselves from being themselves.”
It’s not easy being Michelle Obama. Fabulous, yes. Easy, no. She is a world-class worrier, a change-avoider and, by her own admission, a bit of a nervous Nellie. (As a child, she almost missed her chance to be in a Christmas play, wearing a beloved red velvet dress and patent leather shoes, because she was terrified of sharing the stage with a stuffed turtle.) And let’s just say that spontaneity is not her strong suit: “I’m not a leaper or a flier, but a deliberate, rung by rung ladder climber,” writes the former first lady in her new book, “The Light We Carry.” I’m pretty sure she makes lists, then makes lists of those lists, then color-codes them all.
So it is perhaps no surprise that Obama’s road map for uncertain times resonates in ways that other self-help books do not. If I am going to have someone guide me through this terrain, I don’t want to hear from preternaturally poised Martha Stewart or unflappable George Clooney or, for that matter, that tower of cool and confidence Barack Obama. For this crew, self-assurance seems like a birthright.
The second meaning of irony is less than a couple of centuries old. And it was invented by one guy: an English bishop and classical scholar named Connop Thirlwell, which seems like a typo but isn’t. His 1833 essay “On the Irony of Sophocles” begins with a discussion of the traditional meanings of the term, then pivots to the notion of “practical irony.”
The Roding is London’s largest forgotten river. From its source at the perimeter of Stansted Airport, it fidgets its way south through the Essex countryside, reaching London’s outer limits just shy of Epping Forest. Here, it endures every modern indignity: scythed by motorways and concrete bridges; choked with sewage and rubbish; canalised, fly-tipped, retail-parked, thickened with the polluted slime of London clay. It is a forbidding place to call home.
Yet on a cold winter day in 2017, that is exactly what Paul Powlesland - a boat-dwelling barrister with a penchant for trees, rivers and psychedelic cat leggings - set out to do. An ongoing dispute with the Canal and Rivers Trust (who manage 2000 miles of Britain’s waterways) left Paul looking for a fresh place to moor his narrowboat, and a dream to make the mooring matter. “I wanted to be able to have an impact on the area I’m living in” he tells me by phone call, the Roding’s huge reeds visible over his shoulder, “rather than having to ask permission all the time to do something good.” His vision was a boating community with a difference. Rather than pay dues to a landlord, marina or regulatory body, it would pay them directly toward the transformation of the river itself.
Many of the region's first commercial vines were planted in the mid-1850s by European settlers who experimented with varietals from Bordeaux and other popular wine regions in France and Germany, curious to see whether they would flourish in the sun-splashed, temperate climate and rocky soil. But California might never have earned such viticultural acclaim if it weren't for the little-known story of a Japanese immigrant named Kanaye Nagasawa.
Born into a samurai family and smuggled out of Shogunate Japan, only to become a founding member of a utopian cult and eventually known as the "Wine King of California", Nagasawa led a life that was stranger than fiction. At the peak of his influence at the turn of the 20th Century, Nagasawa was operating one of the largest wineries in California, producing more than 200,000 gallons of wine a year from the vineyards of the 2,000-acre Fountaingrove estate in Santa Rosa.
This novel by Zhang Yueran, a bestselling author in China from the “post-80s generation” – millennial to you and me – arrives in English on a wave of praise from Junot Díaz, Yan Lianke and Ian McEwan. Cocoon, translated by Jeremy Tiang, addresses the impact of the Cultural Revolution on China’s younger generations, and has the force of a story that needed to be told.
What Nick Hornby—novelist, screenwriter, and critic—arrives at is the revelation that Prince and Charles Dickens have a lot in common. In his new book, Dickens and Prince, Hornby lays out this improbable theory, which is rooted less in any obvious similarity (there are none) and more in Hornby’s intuitive sense that both men are what he thinks of as “My People—the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work.” A bold, perhaps even presumptuous claim, but one Prince himself might have admired, if Hornby can make a persuasive case for his theory.
I was never good at Tetris.
I watch you move the L block,
turn it so it fits with I.
You don’t know I know
you’re trying to arrange memories
into an order that makes them disappear.
Although I’m not proud of it, as an author, I often engage in the masochistic ritual of checking my Amazon ranking and reviews.
So back in the spring, shortly after my latest book came out, I typed “The Puzzler” by A. J. Jacobs into the Amazon search bar and pressed “Enter.”
Up came my book, of course. But to my surprise, so did several other books. Six of them. These books had titles such as Summary of The Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs and Workbook for the Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs. They ranged from $5 to $13.
It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.
On the surface, there are few word games that would seem to need active editing less than Wordle. After all, the daily Wordle puzzle boils down to just a single five-letter word. Picking that word each day doesn't exactly require the skill or artistry of, say, crafting an entire crossword puzzle or designing a more algorithmic game like Knotwords.
Despite this, on Monday, The New York Times announced that "Wordle finally has an editor." Which kind of leads to an obvious follow-up question: What does a Wordle editor actually do all day?
As multigenerational family sagas go, they don't get more intense and operatic than Ghost Town, a novel by Kevin Chen and the winner of the 2020 Taiwan Literature Award. Now translated into English thanks to Darryl Sterk, Ghost Town is reminiscent of the dreamlike narratives of Can Xue and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and will require readers to hold on tight to their sense of reality as the prose blurs lines between the living and the dead, the past and the present, and finally, the guilty and the innocent.
To modern readers, “after icebergs” may suggest our experience with climate change and the fact that Arctic and glacial ice are diminishing. We may soon be in a time when icebergs are no longer found where they were in the past. In “After Icebergs with a Painter,” though, the meaning is about going after icebergs, as on a hunt. The book is a reprint of a long-out-of-print manuscript — a diary, really — from an 1859 voyage by an artist and his companion, a writer, to witness and paint giant icebergs floating along North America’s northeastern coast.
In “Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge,” his new book of immersive journalism, Ted Conover returns to his home state to explore the San Luis Valley and the people who live there. The valley’s flat, arid plains are bordered by sand dunes and the Sangre de Cristo mountains and are populated by hundreds of people in remote trailers and cabins, living off the grid.
You might think it a bleak place, so windswept and isolated, but Conover grew to love it.
“I would have gone for the big Zoom setup where you’re sitting up,” he said, “but since we’re going to be talking about Henry, I just wanted to be comfy.”
Henry is Delaney’s 2½-year-old son, the third of his four children. Henry died of brain cancer on that same taupe couch in January 2018. It might seem strange to some that a parent would keep a piece of furniture like that, let alone lie on it for an interview where he will be talking about such a devastating loss, but that’s the thing about grief. You might want to set fire to the reminders, or sink into them. You may feel rage one minute and a burst of love the next. There’s no right or wrong, no explanation needed.
My first glass of black, undiluted, pure robusta was a punch in the neck. It was 2,000-proof vodka plus caffeine. It made me want to dive, open-mouthed, into a swimming pool filled with sweet cream. This was nothing like the other wimpy thing called “coffee” I’d spent my entire life drinking, and at some primitive, sensory level, I struggled to process it. But I controlled my expression because Bang Duong, the man who’d grown and roasted and brewed this Thorlike drink, was seated right across from me. It was January 2020, and we were on the second floor of Ho Chi Minh City’s Tractor Coffee, a mecca of reclaimed wood, unfinished steel, and burlap tones that wouldn’t be out of place in Berkeley or Berlin save for one thing: Tractor was one of the only cafés I could find that made seed-to-cup coffee from the world’s least loved variety of bean. That could make it the staging ground for a far-fetched culinary revolution.
That’s one way of looking at it. Another, perhaps more uncomfortable view is that we’ve never needed to know John Wilkes Booth more than we do right now. His politics — white supremacy, grievance, conspiracy, revanchism — have suddenly broken open and become our politics. His contemporaries aren’t the United States’ mass shooters so much as the right-wing extremists who stormed the capital on January 6 and who now have apologists in the highest rungs of American government. Booth may be remembered as an egomaniacal lone wolf — this despite him working with a group of conspirators, most of whom would later hang for their crimes — but the truth is that he embodied a political tradition as American as the man he shot dead. Indeed, to know Booth, to fully reckon with who he was and to grapple with why he did what he did, is to have a window on the modern United States.
For all its sly humor and cool detachment, “Toad” is a deeply melancholy story, not an elegy for lost youth, but an exorcism. Reflecting on her time with Sam and Carlotta, Sally says, “These things don’t make me wince anymore; I have the excuse of time, which allows me to despise my youth without being at all responsible for most of it.” And, later in the novel, “So many of the desperate things I did in my youth were to combat belonging to the mass identity … all the pain and hatred — it kept me afloat.”
It would be a rare filmmaker who managed to eliminate himself from his own aesthetic prescriptions entirely, or even at all. Tarantino’s critical intelligence both refracts and reflects: He reveals himself in his opinion of others, just as surely as he illuminates their influence in his own work. What unites the various threads and themes of this book is the broad autobiographical truth that he was a filmgoer before he was a filmmaker, and will remain so for far longer. “Does anybody really think Altman watched other people’s movies?” he asks at one point, and in Tarantino’s book, you feel there can be no worse put-down of a fellow director, though he does not say so exactly. That’s what makes it so killer.
I love tacos like I love sad Mexican love songs. Boleros, rancheras, al pastor, asada? Soy, como dicen, barrilito sin fondo. Give me everything that’s hot and burning and hurts as it goes down. Give me seconds. I want it sloppy, running down my hand y saladito. That’s how I love my pain—well seasoned. I don’t remember my life before either was a part of me. Both the tastebuds and the heartache an unintended inheritance of forced migration. My parents packed the gritos and sad mariachis in their bags as they made their way north to Southern California. Music first heard on a small radio in a kitchen in a pueblo in Guanajuato and on a rancho in Sinaloa would be the soundtrack to my formative years. Just like the chile and grilled meats that dad made on Sundays when my grandparents visited.
All if it is part of a home that I’ll never really know but will always long for. That cliché of clichés. I’m not even going to say it, though, I will admit that maybe it is the longing and not the taste that’s the real difference between the Mexican food de aquí y the Mexican food de allá.
Mr Coe’s latest novel is another family chronicle. Each book in his “Rotters” trilogy charted his characters’ progress over several years, but “Bournville” is a far more ambitious affair. The novel spans 75 years and follows four generations of the Lamb family; it is a rich account of important occasions, upheavals and transformations in both modern Britain and individual lives.
It’s exasperating at first. But as so often in the past, I fell under Tarantino’s eerie spell. His passionate knowledge of movies and TV is amazing and slightly terrifying. This kind of engagement is on a level that few ever reach.
But there is something else besides: an element of personal affection for a man they never met. “I feel privileged to have spent several hours in the company of a most genial, affable and upbeat soul indeed,” wrote the novelist Nicholas Royle. One of this year’s Booker Prize shortlisted authors, Shehan Karunatilaka, says that when he was writing his novel, “Uncle Kurt … was a constant companion”.
Why do readers, even hard-nosed professional readers like this one, feel such attachment to both the writing and the man? Part of it may be because with Vonnegut, the soul of the man is so clearly displayed in the writing; and part of it may be because he is a writer that we tend to discover in adolescence, a gateway writer between teenage kicks and grown-up literature, like J.D. Salinger. As with Salinger, there is a disrupted innocence to Vonnegut’s writing, a sense of hope and despair arguing the toss.
Peter Freedman saw danger in the unfamiliar faces around him. It was August 1850, and he had come to Philadelphia looking for parents he had not seen in decades—not since he was separated from them as a child and sold south. The journey from Alabama had been long and arduous, but now that he was here, he was unsure if he should have come. Would he even recognize his parents if he saw them? It had been more than 40 years, after all.
He had good reason to be wary. Though he was now legally free, having purchased his own freedom after decades of bondage, he’d heard stories of kidnappers who were on the lookout for unsuspecting Black men like him. Some of these kidnappers even posed as abolitionists.
In a landscape of overtly wasteful "cooking videos" crafted for nothing other than gross-out humor and clout — not to mention cringeworthy recipe videos like Paula Patton's fried chicken — a certain wholesomeness came through, breaking through the sardonic, hard-edged shell of the internet's collective consciousness. Was it the natural, organic means in which this all came together? The rotisserie chicken guy's no-frills attitude and approach? The aligning synchronicity of the Philadelphia ethos? Inadvertent thirst? His glib, no-frills nonchalance? The RCG's insistence on always consuming a large bottle of seltzer with his requisite rotisserie chicken?
“G-Man” is a very sad story. Hoover’s highest ideal was the nonpartisan public servant, dedicated to burnishing the notion that the federal government was a force for good. And yet by the ’60s, Gage shows, Hoover’s reactionary instincts prevailed, and his actions helped to sow distrust of the federal government from both the right and the left. In the end, he was a “confused, sometimes lonely man.” Gage concludes, “We cannot know our own story without understanding his, in all its high aspiration and terrible cruelty, and in its many human contradictions.”
This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography.
Like many memoirs about personal demons, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom delves into the author's childhood to give a candid account of her various mortifications, of the flesh and otherwise.
The book makes its strongest case when advocating a revision of how to think about, and act towards, animals. Ms Gigliotti points out that humans are only one of millions of species on Earth. She suggests a retreat from anthropocentrism in favour of recognition that animals are individuals with complicated, powerful, creative lives of their own.
The philosophical character of The Velveteen Rabbit, whose subtitle is How Toys Become Real, reflected Bianco’s abiding interest in the relationship between reality and the imagination. “The child mind is far more logical and orderly, far more concerned with the value of realities, than is sometimes supposed,” she wrote. “The fact that these realities may differ from our own has no bearing on the question.” Children are perfectly well aware that the lives of their beloved playthings are imaginary; what they lack, Bianco believed, are the barriers that will be erected in adolescence between imagined realities and material ones. After all, it is quite easy to prove that the imagination makes things real: We call this reading. The little boy’s love for his treasured rabbit is not so different from an adult’s absorption in a good book. For Bianco, the necessary role of fiction was to act as a mental preserve for the once-wild faculty of the imagination, whose domestication is a bittersweet but essential condition of adulthood.
But then I picked it up again, and then put it down, and then picked it up. Confusion gave way to fascination. I realized that the fitful syntax and refusal to explain or contextualize was rendering the experience of having trouble speaking. It’s a difficulty that can be heightened by having one’s language suppressed or displaced. Cha’s parents, both Korean, were raised in Manchuria during Japan’s occupation of Korea and China, and forced to learn and work in Japanese. Cha herself learned English as a second language at eleven, after her family immigrated to the United States. “Dictee” ’s intentionally fractured syntax evokes these experiences of colonization and displacement. Cathy Park Hong, in her 2020 book “Minor Feelings,” says that, when teaching “Dictee,” she instructs students to “approach the book as if they’re learning a new language, so that language is not a direct expression of them but putty in their mouths that they’re shaping into vowels.” What is commonly called “broken” speech, or speech that is not fluent, often provides the underlying music of “Dictee”: “Being broken. Speaking broken. Saying broken. Talk broken. Say broken. Broken speech. Pidgon tongue.”
But the toughest lesson Strong shares in “Flight” is that not every story can have a satisfying conclusion. True reconciliation, safety, stability, fulfillment: These are destinations along a flight path forever uncertain — though shot through, like this novel, with moments of transcendence.
Reading “Toad” is like rummaging through the junk drawer of a fascinating person. It is chaotic, intimate and unruly. There’s not much of a structure or a plot. Still, it’s impossible not to share Naomi Huffman’s bewilderment at the book’s burial. Dunn’s style is unlike that of anyone living or dead: simultaneously practical and bonkers; lovely and nasty. If the story of Sam and Carlotta is slightly dated — a tragedy of misdirected ’60s radicalism — it comes to us by way of a narrator whose psychological pain is horrifyingly timeless.
The story of humans measuring things is no less than the story of civilization — a claim that sounds like irritating hyperbole but in this case turns out to be true. Vincent conveys how measurement developed as a “scaffold for knowledge,” encouraging us to categorize and make comparisons. It is also extraordinarily powerful, “a tool of social cohesion and control.”
To say that the act of a woman is the act of a foreigner, an
immigrant, to set itself to and from these coordinates.
I hope that we all have places in our lives in which we allow ourselves to be a bit sloppy. I also hope that we all have places in our lives in which we allow ourselves to imagine. But this is one month a year we get to harness both together.
It’s possible to divide the world in two: the part that venerates the humble-seeming fruit known as the date, and the part that does not. The part that does is home to hundreds of millions of people, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco across North Africa and Egypt to Mesopotamia and east to India. In this part of the world there aren’t really “dates,” because only a philistine would speak in such generalizations. There’s the plump sugar-bomb medjool, the chewy khalas beloved of Emirati connoisseurs, sweet and sticky Saudi sukkary, tart yellow barhi peeled and eaten fresh, the varieties picked early, called rutab, and served frozen with coffee at the upscale cafés of Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. There’s ajwa from Medina, said to be the favorite of the Prophet, the dark Persian kimia, the translucent deglet noor, and many others with evocative names like halawi or Sagai VIP.
As an Englishman, my relationship with jerky is like my relationship with a Bloody Mary — it’s not a thing where I’m from, but it looks cool. I want nothing more than to be able to confidently swill a half pint of tomato juice and chomp on a vodka-soaked pickle to ease my hangover, or chow through a bag of torn cow flesh like a real cowboy man. But then I’m reminded that it tastes bad. I’ve never gotten to the bottom of a Bloody Mary glass, or bag of dried beef. But this isn’t your average jerky.
Habanero buffalo, teriyaki ahi tuna, black pepper ostrich. Dozens of jerkies in front of me. I ask the server what the most popular offering is — “Spicy Memphis BBQ … soft,” she says, confidently. She bags up a handful for me and I shuffle across the tiles to the next attraction in this 26,000-square-foot room that claims to be the biggest gas station in California — EddieWorld.
“Flight” slips free of its tight narrative frame: More than just a domestic tale, it is a larger portrait of hearts and minds at war with the tedium of everydayness and the rote routines of relationships. As Tess notes of her own sisters, “The love among them was complicated, stunted, sometimes painful.” Grab a mug of egg nog, good readers, and dive in.
These days, teenagers of the 1990s find themselves in the bizarre position of having to conjure their childhoods as if they had taken place in the 1890s. Is life before smartphones really so alien? American teens still drive around with their nascent licenses, listening to questionable music, eating Pop-Tarts from gas stations (possibly, chillingly, the same Pop-Tarts). More important, they still develop intense and thrilling friendships. In his fourth novel, “Now Is Not the Time To Panic,” Kevin Wilson (best known for “Nothing to See Here” and “The Family Fang”) addresses the contours of this liminal time, capturing the still-relevant feeling of trying “to remember what was in the cassette player, if it was cool.” His is a buoyant tribute to small-town life, a book about creativity and creation in a world before “send” buttons.
And now he’s written “Novelist as a Vocation,” a reflection on his career. It blends writing advice and memoir, tracking his early triumphs — in typically magical Murakamian fashion, he won a prize for his first novel after submitting his only copy of the manuscript to the judges — through his years as an international star, his work translated into more than 50 languages, his betting odds for the Nobel Prize very short each October.
The result is a book that’s assured, candid and often — never meet your heroes, they say — deeply irritating.
There is nothing very sexy about hope. Certainly, there is nothing sexy about grace. The idea that we might be redeemed by an act of love—a wordless affirmation of something beyond the paradigms through which we are capable of understanding ourselves—is, well, a little mawkish, a bit cringe. Hope has little aesthetic appeal. Hope is the awkward comic reversal, shoehorned in like the end of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, which rewrites the Greek myth to have the doomed lovers be reunited by none other than the soprano-singing personification of love itself. Better at least, according to Ivan Karamazov, to look at the horrors of the world straight on, to stare the absent and unloving God in the face, to take stock of the rapes and murders and terrors and quotidian derelictions that make up the whole of human existence, and to live—whatever that kind of living looks like—accordingly. Better to know that our life is inherently a tragic one—a conclusion no less inescapable than the fact that two parallel lines will never meet.
I’d come to the Pigeon Butte prairie one May morning in search of Fender’s blue because I wanted to see firsthand the particular beauty of this rare butterfly. But also, at a time when an estimated half-million insect species worldwide face extinction, and butterfly populations are shrinking at unprecedented rates, I wanted to witness the thing this creature represented—proof that amid such overwhelming loss, recovery, too, remains possible.
For all its vulnerability and tough beauty, Losing the Plot can feel challenging in places, its poetic inclinations thwarting a more straightforward reading. Yet those frustrations are eloquent in their own way, speaking to all that is destined to go unexplained – but not necessarily unfelt – between immigrants and the children they raise far from the place their heart still knows as home.
Ultimately, as with his earlier nonfiction book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (competing in marathons and deep listening to jazz, classical and rock are his other passions), Novelist As a Vocation is a series of intriguing glimpses inside the singular mind of Murakami. He approaches running and writing instinctively and intuitively, slowly burnishing his skills with a mixture of discipline and doggedness. “As I run,” he writes, “I feel that’s not all there is to it. There’s something more important deeper down in running. But it’s not at all clear to me what that something is…” Writing novels in which characters “naturally emerge from the flow of the story” is also a way of engaging with, and trusting in, that something more important that lies deeper down in the unconscious. For Murakami, it has paid dividends.
If Paris is a moveable feast, as Hemingway would tell every college junior on a gap year, then Rome is a stately banquet at which guests linger perhaps longer than they intended. The photographer, critic and salonist Milton Gendel was one. He arrived there on a Fulbright scholarship at 30, and more or less stayed for almost 70 more years.
Born in New York City (a … diner with clattering forks?) to Russian immigrants in the garment industry — his mother once clocked a nonunion worker with an umbrella during a strike — Gendel grew up to be perhaps the most cultivated person many of your cultivated friends have never heard of. “Just Passing Through,” a new book of his diaries and photographs elegantly edited by Cullen Murphy, the former captain of The Atlantic, thumbs its nose at that careerist New York party question: “What do you do?”
It’s harrowing and revealing about the juncture where extreme compound addiction collides with mega-celebrity. It’s a scream of authentic human pain, albeit one sprinkled with stardust. You end up admiring his honesty.
Twenty-nine years later, Helminski tries not to dwell on the most traumatic moment of her past. But she also doesn’t forget. Every morning, as she takes her service dog, Zoey, out for exercise—sometimes a run, sometimes a walk, sometimes a racewalk and sometimes a combination of the three—in their neighborhood, she sees the sneakers sitting beside her front closet door. “They empower me to put one foot in front of the other,” she says. “They empower me to accomplish what I want to accomplish.”
That November’s race was supposed to be her first marathon. Her time would determine whether she would qualify for the United States Olympic Trials in racewalking. Aspirations of competing on a global stage have long since faded. This Sunday, however, Helminski will look to finish what she started three decades earlier and race in the New York City Marathon. She had to relearn how to walk and relearn how to speak after her attack. Now, she’s trained herself once again to compete. “It’s worth it,” she says. “Having the courage to step out of my comfort zone and say, ‘I’m going to approach this, even though it almost cost me my life.’”
Last week, Singapore became the first country to approve the commercial sale of a protein grown “out of thin air”, according to its marketing tagline. Solein, a yellow powder resembling grated parmesan, is the product of microbes that are fed gases – carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen – and nutrients. According to its developer, the Finnish company Solar Foods, it will be used in products such as plant-based meats, breads and spreads.
Singapore has emerged as a global hotspot for the alternative protein industry, with startups flocking to the island to develop and launch animal-free alternatives to traditional meat products.
These islands have been turned over again and again in the search for more knowledge about their past. And the amazing thing is, that they probably have still much more to reveal.
Implied inner palpability as transpersonal dictation
all works composed as a musical ark
as if rowing in an isthmus of lightning
My first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979, is fewer than 200 pages long. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it. I ran a jazz cafe, and I spent my 20s labouring from morning to night to pay off debts. But the real problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff – my favourites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks – I had never read modern Japanese novels (of the “serious” variety) in any concerted way. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in Japanese.
For several months, I operated on pure guesswork, adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it, but when I read through the result I was far from impressed. “Good grief,” I moaned, “this is hopeless.” What I had written seemed to fulfil the formal requirements of a novel, yet it was rather boring and, as a whole, left me cold.
A novel I once read described a protagonist as the sort of woman who reads a cookbook in bed. I glance at my bedside and ponder the hardcovers sitting there. Hetty McKinnon. Anna Jones. Alison Roman. Are these not the great writers of our time? Steinbeck lies under a glass of water; the essential, reliable storyteller and coaster. But for practical, everyday beauty, for hope, for love, for mind-changing advice, it was always cookbooks.
Several years ago, Ryan Baumann, a digital humanities developer at Duke University, was leafing through an early twentieth century collection of ancient Greek manuscripts when he ran across an intriguing comment. The author noted that there was an undeciphered form of shorthand in the margins of a piece of papyrus and added a hopeful note that perhaps in the future scholars might be able to read it. The casual aside set Baumann off on a new journey to unlock the secrets of an ancient code.
Initially, Baumann told me, he thought that perhaps everything had been deciphered. “I thought to myself, ‘well, it’s been about 100 years, maybe someone HAS figured it out!’ So, I looked into it, and to my delight, the system of ancient Greek shorthand does seem to have been largely figured out.” To his dismay, though, this century-spanning scholarly achievement has also been largely overlooked and underexplored. Very few people are interested in shorthand.
This is an exquisite story told in exquisite prose. In it, we sense a world troubled by the most essential kind of trouble. Yet, because of her great gifts, Claire Keegan has given us a tale that affirms life and gives us hope. And, even more important, she has created an unforgettable character whose courage can give us courage. This is a story that makes it clear that no act of bravery is ever futile and, by extension, we must each do our part, however small. Her moral message is timely, and our gratitude should be boundless.
When my niece was 4 years old, I introduced her to a swamp — in a park east of Seattle on a trail for kids that was posted with a series of illustrated signs narrating a story called “Zoe and the Swamp Monster.” The word, “swamp,” in all its mystery, beauty, and monstrosity, was new vocabulary to her. We tromped into the dark greenery toward the sedge meadows and read Zoe’s story aloud to each other, about a little girl who befriends a series of swampland animals. I also showed her how to identify bedstraw — a plant with tiny Velcro-like hooks — and attach it to her parents’ clothing, much to their annoyance and her amusement. We stared at mud puddles, mushrooms, leaves, birds’ nests, ferns, and willows, and searched for swampy bogeymen — though none appeared. At the end of the walk, she shouted into the trees, “I’m not afraid of you, Swamp!” It was the lesson I had hoped she’d find there.
It was also a rare moment — both the kind of kid-nature experience that is becoming scarce as everyone spends far too much time with screens, and a quiet revelation about the magic of swampy places. As Annie Proulx reminds us in her new book, “Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis,”wetlands are stigmatized in common language, stories, and rhetoric. Quagmires and morasses, for instance, should be avoided.
David duchovny keeps distracting me. “Hey, look at those amazing things.” He’s pointing out toward the horizon where people appear to hover above the ocean on what a later Google search reveals to be electric surfboards. “They’re like fucking magic carpets.”
It’s mid-morning in Malibu, and I’m here to talk to Duchovny about his fifth book in only a handful of years, The Reservoir. Written from his old apartment overlooking Central Park, the pandemic-era story mirrors Thomas Mann’s own feverish novella, Death in Venice. Yet sitting down with Duchovny on the porch of Soho House, the Pacific fussing just a few feet away, all I can think about is California. Having flown in from New York City the night before, I’m still rather awestruck by our surroundings — the dramatic canyons and violent surf, shameless beaches called Billionaire’s and Dume — but Duchovny is perfectly at ease. He’s looking fit, tan, and, at 61, finally showing some gray, which suits him.
Tarantino has been thinking about writing “Cinema Speculation” for years, The book evolved, he says, from being a mere appreciation of his favorites to a survey of films that inspired a “point of view worth talking about.”
“Doing this made me respect the professionals of film criticism even more for the simple fact that I realized I couldn’t do what they do,” Tarantino says. “If my job was to go and watch the new movies every week and then write what I thought, I can’t imagine I would have anything to say about everything, other than offer a plot summary and a ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘indifferent’ verdict. With the book, I wanted to find something quirky that’s interesting and worth talking about.”
It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a fan. For devotees of mega-franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s never been a more massive glut of new content. We’re living through a golden age of interconnected storytelling, as sequels and prequels explode across film, television, and literature faster than many of us can keep up. Yet at the same time, these mega-franchises are tormented by their most strident fans, melting down into paroxysms of toxicity through petitions, review bombing, and targeted harassment campaigns, among other odious tactics. Toxic fandom is a complex beast, but at the root of its many convulsions, there’s often one sore spot: the sticky concept of canon.
New fans of these universe-hopping stories are seeing some of the challenges that come with infinite options and rebootability: meaning itself grows tenuous when the narrative has no limits.
Aime Pokwatka’s Self-Portrait with Nothing takes a different approach to these problems, focusing on the psychological problem of the multiverse, even as it uses actual alternate realities as a haunting plot device.
Erika T. Wurth's White Horse belongs to the new wave of horror fiction that delivers the creepiness and darkness readers have always associated with the genre, while also packing plenty of social commentary.
Also — and perhaps more importantly — White Horse is a horror novel that subverts one of the elements at the core of the genre from the beginning: Instead of the writer being someone who is afraid of the other, the writer is the other.
In the novels of highly decorated Australian author Alex Miller, the discovery of a journal or letter will often spark an unexpected, life-affirming journey. The two-time Miles Franklin award winner is a master of capturing that pivotal moment, when the tides that push our lives here or there, change. New pathways open, new friendships form and the future transforms. Following a spate of nonfiction works – 2020’s Max, and 2017’s autobiographical The Passage of Love – Miller’s new novel A Brief Affair returns to some of the themes and characters we are familiar with from his well-known books such as The Ancestor Game or Journey to the Stone Country.
Like so many others who found purchase in the world of food over the past 20 years, I was indebted to Powell for democratizing that world, for demystifying it, for showing that it could and perhaps should be breached by people who came to it not with a gastronome’s formal training and fancy vocabulary but with passion, with personality, with Tums.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. She also wrote, with her husband, more than twenty screenplays in order to make money. The couple was hardly alone: from the early days of Hollywood, literary figures like Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Brecht took a swing at the pictures. More recent efforts have come from Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, and Martin Amis. There’s even a whole Coen brothers movie about serious writers slumming it in Tinseltown, replete with a William Faulkner stand-in. It’s an understandable trade-off, using commerce to fund art; sometimes Nobel Prize winners need day jobs too.
The motivations are less apparent when the situation is reversed.
All we’ve learned is that, yes, we all read the same book, but that some parts of the book resonated more with some people. Now if we want to know the why of what makes some people like some things and other people like other things, well … we can talk about it if we want, but on a fundamental level, does anyone care? We already know that different people respond to the same thing in different ways. Surely this isn’t why we started a book club.
After eating, there was more eating. The Peranakans would not stop feeding me, although I couldn’t tell if this was a peculiarly Peranakan trait or simply symptomatic of Singapore, where eating is the national pastime, along with its corollary, talking about eating. A friend of Wee’s, Serene Liok, 74, threw me a popiah party at her home near the Singapore Botanic Gardens — a party because popiah, fresh spring rolls, are so labor-intensive to make, you must share the bounty. The featherweight skins were kept damp under a wet cloth until called into service, rough side up on the plate, smeared with garlic and chile pastes, then topped with lettuce leaves, ribs broken the better to lie flat; a filling of jicama, bamboo shoots, pork belly, shrimp and tofu, drained in a colander so the skins wouldn’t get soggy; thin arcs of shrimp, darkly sweet lap cheong shards, bean sprouts, cucumber and strips of omelet and tofu that looked like they’d been run through a paper shredder (the fineness of the cutting testifies to the cook’s skill); sweet bean sauce, sticky enough to cling a little to the spoon; and fried garlic, fried flour, fried flatfish — all pulverized into a crunchy dust — plus, in the Liok family’s variation, seaweed, which startled another Peranakan there; chopped cilantro; then one more layer of filling before it was rolled up tight.
But with each meal, I wondered: Am I getting any closer to understanding what it means to be Peranakan? What is it that unites a people? That is, what makes them see themselves as a people? Is it the food they eat, the language they speak, the rituals they follow, the gods they revere — or is it more nebulous and more instinctual: a sense of kinship through collective experience?
But the Crunchwrap’s stronghold on Portland chefs isn’t just a play on fast food nostalgia and Instagram bait; its structure and format are objectively well-suited to a balanced, fun, creative dish. It’s portable with built-in textural contrast at its center. “When I made the fried chicken and queso cheese Crunchwrap at Bullard, I went on record saying it was the best thing I made in my life,” Bella says. “I think that’s where the humor comes from. It’s only a funny joke if it’s an incredible plate of food.”
So ghosts were an established fact of my life when I was growing up, maybe the only real religious certainty we inherited. My grandmother—also a churchgoing Christian—accepted their existence with the same serene passivity with which she did everything. My mother claims to have seen a few. I have not. I used to think I’d never see a ghost because I wanted it too much, as though the spirits of dead people behaved like an underwritten man from an early season of Sex and the City. I’d even lived after college in a converted brownstone that was widely considered to be haunted—former tenants had seen apparitions and my roommate had had unsettling experiences with slamming pocket doors and rogue electronics. I never felt anything at all. But my faith is solid.
Artist and author Shaun Tan creates semi-mechanical and animalesque beings that seem born of both the natural world and industrious humans. Whimsical, cerebral, socially aware, grotesque and cuddly, Tan's artistic universe runs the emotional gamut.
Creature: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections is a comprehensive collection of Tan's artwork from the last 25 years as well as essays by Tan about his creative practice and lifelong fascination with creatures.
Cells build organisms from the ground up, and therefore to choose to write about them is to give oneself permission to explore almost any aspect of the living world. They are “a life within a life” as Siddhartha Mukherjee puts it in his latest book, which takes advantage of that licence to offer a comprehensive account of basic biology, alongside a history of the many great minds that have helped us to see beyond widespread misconceptions to scientific truth.
Throughout all of this, I never sought to deny the painful history of British colonialism—instead, I simply chose to look the other way, putting it out of my mind in favor of more comfortable, depoliticized aesthetics. It wasn’t until I got older, and my nascent left-wing sensibilities had finally begun to develop from an ill-defined patchwork of amorphous principles into a more coherent, systemic political ethos which held anti-imperialism as one of its central tenets, that I began to confront these questions for the first time. What did it mean that as a child, having never learned my mother tongue or expressed much interest in connecting with my roots on any meaningful level, I felt more connected to the art and literature of my people’s colonizers than that of my own culture? What did it mean that this author, so beloved not only to me but to my parents, and to millions of their fellow countrymen and women, was a household name in India solely because of colonization’s far-reaching legacies? And what does it mean, even knowing all that I know now, that I still can’t seem to shake the warm, nostalgic comfort that I feel when I think about those stories?
A pecan tart is a tiny ode to pleasure. The pastry is unobtrusive but flavorful. Cream cheese adds a waft of sweetness. Its butter pastry dissolves on your tongue, beside a pecan mixture that’s crunchy and decadent and punchy — but not so filling that you can’t chew a single tart over coffee, or gulp a handful just before you’ve set the table for dinner. For a small amount of labor, the feeling you’ll yield is immense. Whether in moderation or excess, the pecan tart is a solid hang.
But in the same way that clichés exist because they hold a truth inside of them, there’s something extraordinary about Keegan’s ability to make some of the very oldest stories feel too specific to be any other story but themselves. “Foster” is exactly as sad as you imagine it would be, but more stunningly alive than you have any right to expect. Its language settles in your belly and then your bones only seconds after it has passed your eyes.
Here, as elsewhere, the author has made sure that we know no more than his protagonist, and usually less; we rely on the children in his stories to explain his beautiful, broken worlds to us and to assure us that they will fix them, if they can. Perhaps Shuna’s gods are some arcane far-future relatives of ours, or perhaps they lived long ago, in some pocket of history that mere grownups have forgotten about. Miyazaki is not here to satisfy adults or to make them happy; his focus remains on children, and, as a present to them, he has made his worlds repairable by children, sometimes with nothing more or less remarkable than a handful of grain. Our own world, he has always said, ought to be made repairable, too.
One of the great pleasures of these novels is their repetitive nature, and according to Lucy Worsley’s new biography, Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, Christie’s life was a continuous yearning for a return to childhood pleasures. In that desire, she was not unusual. It was, however, her manner of conjuring those pleasures—through a signature mix of charming settings and cold, logical violence—that presents a mystery, since few authors have managed to assemble a body of work at once so comforting and so emotionless, so quaint and orderly and yet so saturated with cruelty.
But from 1983 on, HBO set out to acquire more original content catering to “male passions”: documentary shows like “Eros America” (later wisely renamed “Real Sex”) and raunchy mysteries like “The Hitchhiker,” which HBO’s own employees sardonically referred to as “F— a Stranger, Then Die.” During this era, if writers received feedback from on high that a particular episode lacked “cable edge,” the message was easily translated: needs more tits. A male executive once shot down the idea of building a series around a female comedian because “they’re not going to take their tops off.”
The profitability — and cost — of male fantasies is a running theme in Felix Gillette and John Koblin’s new book, “It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution and Future of HBO.” Both veteran media reporters, Gillette (Bloomberg) and Koblin (The New York Times) provide an exhaustive and only occasionally tedious account of how HBO’s executives, producers and creators built an indelible brand.
Overwatered the fire lilies.
Underwatered the aloe.
Prayed to the sun god
to dispel my gloom.
As with most things when decided upon at first—a beloved, a political cause, or, in my own case, the writing of poems—it’s easy to think all we have to do is start doing: show love, be politically alert, write poems. Maybe one of the chief values of enthusiasm is its ability to simultaneously energize us toward commitment and render us usefully—for the time—oblivious to the sheer stamina that sustained commitment, what we call a career, requires. Shortly after my first book was published, a teacher of mine told me that having a career in poetry was like riding a runaway open streetcar, that the secret was to hold on tightly and stay aboard, rather than becoming one of the many who get thrown off, into the street. “Keep watching, you’ll see what I mean,” he said. I remember being amused and more than a little horrified by this image, but I’ve come to understand the general idea, and I don’t disagree, not entirely. Thinking back to all of the writers who started publishing around the same time as I did, there are so many whose voices I had thought would be the dominant ones for decades to come—yet they fell silent or, if not silent, never matched or in any way came close to the achievement for which they were earlier acclaimed. There are just as many others whose voices seemed negligible to me, whose work I’d still call unsurprising, yet it continues, like the writers themselves, to thrive and be published widely. And there is a third group, of modest accomplishment at the start, who have managed to differently surprise me by becoming better. I now see how much more powerful stamina can be than talent; or to say it another way, how powerless talent is, on its own, without stamina—rather like what is said about the body once the soul has left it, though I don’t believe in the soul. I do believe in stamina.
Jennings, 48, often thinks about life’s funny timing. If he had not gone on a road trip with a friend to try out for “Jeopardy!” right around when the show lifted its limit of five games, he never would have stunned the world by reeling off 74 wins in a row, never would have won about $2.5 million, never would have become a celebrity instead of living the alternate version of his life, in which he envisions himself as “a mildly unhappy Salt Lake City computer programmer.”
And he really never would have predicted that he would one day replace the legendary Alex Trebek. As proof, we direct you to Jennings’s Reddit username, which is WatsonsBitch. “See, that is the kind of thing you do when you are absolutely convinced you are not going to be host of ‘Jeopardy!,’ ” Jennings said, laughing, during an interview after the taping. (The name is a reference to IBM supercomputer Watson, the machine that crushed Jennings in a competition-slash-ratings stunt in 2011.)
You know him. Everybody knows him. The opera cape and the tuxedo and the hypnotic gaze and the Mitteleuropean accent and the winking lines about not drinking … wine and staying out of the sun. Many of these are from Hollywood adaptations, from Dracula’s Daughter to Love at First Bite, but the original Bram Stoker novel, a century and a quarter old this year, gave the character his long-standing appeal—for reasons well worth thinking about today.
Now that I’ve led you onto the unstable foundations of translation and pointed out how unreliable its construction material is, I hope to reclaim a firmer footing by exploring the essential questions: Can we trust translations? and why should we?
Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson — later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) — was captivated by the rings’ beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated.
Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required.
What is the value of beauty in recluse? Curiously, during the pandemic, many people seized on this period of compulsory isolation to beautify themselves. Interest in plastic surgery and cosmetic services surged. Online forums dedicated to “glow up” transformations proliferated. Even alone, most people felt beholden to some imagined scrutiny. The narrator of Toad, Katherine Dunn’s fourth novel, offers a perceptive remark on this tendency. “There was no cigarette lit, no itch scratched without a full awareness of the audience,” Sally Gunnar observes to herself. “If there was no audience, we rehearsed.” Young people especially. They “do not exist without someone looking at them.” If beauty is social currency, quantified by the gaze of others, its value would collapse without an audience. Forsaking beauty requires a total rejection of people, of all society.
Published after Dunn’s 2016 death, Toad considers the freedoms and limitations of a woman’s indefinite isolation. Recluse offers Sally dignity and distance from an ugly, troubled past. Her ambling narration is caustic and occasionally sentimental, oscillating between scenes from her scrappy college years and her tumultuous adult life. In youth, Sally was undesirable, unseemly, and suicidal. She admits to being “a great follower of persons,” seeking approval and affection in those who rarely returned it. Now, alone in middle age, she is finally content. Her physical traits, once the source of her ire, are unimportant: “Am I getting fat? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, the goldfish won’t complain.”
N.K. Jemisin’s new novel, “The World We Make,” is the kind of book you lose an entire day to, hour after hour going by unnoticed, and emerge shaken and dazzled on the other end. The writing is clear and visceral and intense. It’s some of the most brilliant, unapologetic speculative fantasy I’ve read in years.
Recently, The New York Times published a photograph of children in Ukraine playing on a playground, surrounded by bombed-out buildings. I happened to see it the same week I was reading “Trespasses,” the brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking debut novel by Louise Kennedy. I think the two will be forever linked in my mind.
In a risky move on Bublitz’s part, Alice is our narrator, watching events unfold after her murder. For a novel with a dead narrator, however, “Before You Knew My Name” crackles with life and energy. It is a tour de force of imagination, empathy and righteous fury. Dead girls rarely get to be fully realized in crime fiction, and Alice seizes the speaking role.
Despite its high-flown and somewhat misleading title, The Philosophy of Modern Song is a kind of strange companion to those sleeve notes rather than a philosophical treatise on the art and craft of songwriting. Illustrated with a wealth of sometimes tangentially linked photographs (publicity stills, snapshots, landscapes and classic documentary images by the likes of Dorothea Lange and William Klein), it comprises 66 deeply subjective essays on songs Dylan holds dear, from standards and groundbreakers to obscurities and oddities.
In 1994, three weeks before he was cast as Chandler Bing in Friends, Matthew Perry prayed.
“God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.” The actor’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, is the story of how God held up both sides of that bargain. It is an account of three decades of addiction, crippling pain, comas, an exploding colon, loneliness, self-hatred, self-sabotage, failed relationships, and expensive rehabs (it is also an account of the staggering expense of sobriety). Reading it is exactly as grim and as exhausting as all that sounds. For a book about a life getting high, this is a collection only of lows.
Rodriguez, an artist who has built sculptures from recordings of Dead shows, gives readers a kaleidoscope view of the band’s storied tapers. He thoroughly explores their obsessive quest for the lost chord and how they contributed to several cottage industries that grew up alongside the Dead, ranging from fanzines that published setlists to tape-trading exchanges to entrepreneurs who churned out cassette covers decorated with dancing bears, Ice Cream Kid and lots of skulls and roses.